Seahorse - Janice Pariat

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And often they mainly remember the agreeable, latching on to the winsome details. A wave across the lawn. At the café, a round of tea at his insistence and expense. A recommended book. His smile. Rare, precious gesture—that in an instant swept you into his closest, most secret circle.

      Yet the lines were drawn long before we imagined, who would be allowed in, how much, how far, always keeping, inevitably, to himself. Intact. In his own hands, he was porcelain.

      I see that now.

      If he spent more time with Adheer, it was because Adheer sought him out more persistently, and successfully, than all the others. Hurrying after him in the corridors, waiting, nonchalantly, by the gates, reading on the lawns. Accompanying him to university talks and seminars. And while Nicholas escaped unscathed, for it didn’t strike anyone to mock him, people called Adheer a “bender” behind his back. Others employed their words more delicately: “Look at him,” they whispered, “that poo pusher.”

      In college everything was sexualized.

      And looking back now, I realize, that was one thread that stitched us into some kind of collective. The mystery of sex, and (mostly) its lack.

      Living in residence halls fueled by male camaraderie, regarding the close co-existence of girls, their mighty distance. In there, we were swamped by complex hierarchies and communal fissures, trapped in an intricate system of jurisdiction—where the Jats were feared, the Punjus scorned, the northeasterners ignored, the Gujjus mocked, the Tam Brams held in mild amusement, the Bongs quietly tolerated, the Mallus generally liked by all and sundry. Then came the broader divisions of sports quota folk and special reservations, the slackers and endless Civil Service sloggers, the cool and uncool, the artsies and sciencees.

      All entwined in the general joyful wastefulness of youth. And something else.

      We’d move from room to room, swapping cigarettes, alcohol and lies. Talking, skirting the issue, the act of, plucking euphemisms from insecurity—do it, bang, beat, bone, bugger, screw, bonk, go all the way, home run, old in-out, pound, bed, shag, slay, mount, boff, bugger, cut, dance, dip, doink, scuff, fire, fubb, fuck, fug, do the nasty, get any, get it on, get lucky, give it up, hit it raw, hit skins, have a go, grease, hose, knock, make the beast with two backs, woopie, nail, ram, rock and roll, score, shine it, slap and tickle, smack, smash, lay, hump, plow, quickie, romp, ride, roger, you know what.

      It was endless, and language the sheet with which we all hid our nakedness, and longing.

      On most weekends, the residence halls emptied, as students headed out to South Delhi or Connaught Place—the ones who could afford to drink at newly opened bars or watch movies at shiny multiplex cinemas. I’d been to South Delhi a few times, traveling there on a long bus ride from the Inter State Bus Terminal at Kashmiri Gate, filled with vehicles spewing smoke, roaring like metallic monsters. Past the green expanse of Raj Ghat alongside Mahatma Gandhi Road, the perpetually chaotic ITO, and the gated distance of Pragati Maidan. Slowing down once the bus cut into the city, passing through Lajpat Nagar with its labyrinthine market, the calmer environs of Siri Fort, Delhi’s second city, bourgeoisly concealing its brutal origins—founded by Ala-ud-din Khilji on the severed heads of eight thousand Mongol soldiers. From there, it wasn’t far to our destination, to Saket Complex, lined with air-conditioned shops, a colorful new McDonalds and TGIF, and, its crowning glory, a royal blue-gold PVR cinema.

      Others made their way to neighborhoods clustered around the college campus, to flats and apartments rented by their outstation friends, for parties fueled by cheap booze and marijuana. There were some, who stayed in, from not having been invited, or propeled by the fear of an unfinished assignment.

      A Sunday night spent mustering inspiration to discuss Waiting For Godot as an existentialist text. The essence of existentialism focuses on the concept of the individual’s freedom of choice, as opposed to the belief that humans are controlled by a pre-existing omnipotent being, such as God. Estragon and Vladimir have made the choice of waiting, without instruction or guidance…

      After a few insipid attempts, I’d usually sneak down to the common room in the residence hall. In the dark, the television screen burned tense and bright. Muted souls sat on the ground; one close enough to change channels expertly with an outstretched leg. The set had recently been hooked to Star TV and moved effortlessly from one channel to the next. Music followed by sport followed by the news, by movies and back again, in a dizzying circle. A ring of sacred, ancient rocks, surrounded by solstice worshippers. Often, I’d sit at the back while the others argued over what to watch—highlights of a tennis match between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, last year’s Bollywood blockbuster Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, or endless MTV, where Nirvana and Pearl Jam displayed incredible angst and apathy.

      Invariably, the dissent ceased at eleven. When the adult films aired.

      Movies for which no one cared about the plot. A psychiatrist who fell in love with his troubled patient. A professor with his student. A young boy with his older neighbor.

      Hisses and whistles broke out each time the girl’s dress dropped, or the lead ran his hand up her thigh. The images unfolded in a montage of flesh and desire. Nobody bothered to follow dialogue, waiting mostly for the scenes in the pool, the shower. In a room that looked like a picture from a magazine, filled with plush leather sofas and pristine glass tables (did people really live like that?), where they (always a man and woman) fell in a heap on a spongy grey carpet. And then moved seamlessly to a wooden bed with rumpled blue sheets. Her bare breasts shiny and heaving under his hand. With a twist he’d grind into her from the back, while she clung loosely to the head board. Another time, in a Jacuzzi, lathered and wet, the water soapy in strategic places. She’d climb on top and arch against him. Scene change. And they’d be in a room filled with light streaming in from tall windows. On a table, he’d cradle her back and lean in towards her. Then the image splintered—caught in a kaleidoscopic reflection of bodies writhing in pleasure. When the credits rolled, few would leave. We waited, breathless, to watch the next offering.

      In college, everything was sexualized, yet it was impossible to talk about sex.

      On rare occasion, though, they took place, those conversations that cut cleanly through the euphemisms. When I returned to Delhi in mid-July for my second year at university, I found I’d been shifted into a room with someone new. A spindly long-limbed Tibetan. Kalsang, I was relieved to find, was minimally intrusive. He didn’t talk all that much, he didn’t pry, or ask me questions about my life in my hometown, or why I wrote letters to Lenny. We shared joints and lives of mutual exclusivity.

      Yet sometimes, late at night, when it was marginally cooler, we’d keep the window open, our room filling with the fragrance of something sweet, a distant flowering saptaparni. The pathways outside cobbled and vacant, bathed in yellow lamplight. We had conversations that, at that hour, people usually only held with themselves. Entirely plausible, of course, that this was intimacy occasioned by weed or alcohol, but I like to think it a special exclusion.

      “I lost my virginity to my cousin,” Kalsang once told me. “I was fourteen, she was seventeen. We were visiting them in Kathmandu… I was sleeping on a mattress in the sitting room and she came downstairs… I was so scared someone would walk in. You know, my parents were sleeping in the next room… if they’d caught me…”

      “What would’ve happened?”

      “I don’t know… they would’ve killed me.”

      “Do you still see her?”

      A long, errant silence. “Sometimes.”

      On another night, even though I was terrified, I admitted, “I’ve never, you know…”

      “What?”

      “You know…”

      I could see him, in the darkness, his outline upright on the bed.

      “Never

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